Canadian Targeting Solutions for Tight Media Budgets
CMOs are living in an ‘era of less,’ according to Gartner’s just-released 2024 CMO Spend Survey. This doesn’t surprise me at all. I talk to several Canadian marketing leaders every week, and there are three consistent trends I’m hearing:
- Budgets are tight.
- They’re being asked to do more with less.
- They lack the resources—whether talent, technology, data, or a combination of all three—to do what they know is the right thing to do.
Gartner’s recent survey highlights a stark reality: in 2019, marketing budgets averaged 10.5% of total revenue; by 2024, they’ve dropped to 7.7%. This decline comes at a time when marketing complexity has skyrocketed, driven by media fragmentation, privacy regulations, and AI. With tighter budgets and rising expectations, marketers are doubling down on paid media to deliver results.
But here’s the challenge: increased paid media investments come with heightened pressure to deliver ROI or ROAS. While AI offers promising advancements—like generative AI for creative and predictive tools for insights—most marketing teams are still in the early stages of experimentation. AI won’t be the short-term silver bullet many hope for.
As a marketing leader, you’re likely thinking, “I already know this. What’s new?” That’s the moment of clarity: the solution isn’t a brand-new tool or revolutionary technology. It’s about stepping back and adopting a more audience-first, macro-level perspective.
At its core, the purpose of marketing hasn’t changed. Success still hinges on finding the right audience, delivering the right message, and engaging them at the right moment to drive action. Whether it’s convincing someone to try a new brand of cereal or switch insurance providers, everything starts with identifying the right audience.
No matter how much you invest in paid media, if a portion of your spend isn’t reaching the right people—whether through digital, CTV, DOOH, or direct mail—you’re wasting budget. From targeting acquisition media to existing customers or delivering offers outside of service areas, misaligned campaigns are wasted dollars.
The Solution: Audience-First, Omnichannel Marketing
The key is to deeply understand and precisely segment your audiences, then ensure you’re reaching them consistently across every channel. It’s not about targeting people who are similar to your ideal customers—it’s about reaching the actual audience that matters most, wherever they are.
Take the example of Papa John’s. Despite optimizing their campaigns and promotional offers, they faced challenges in refining their audience targeting. Limited by resources, budget, and data, their team focused on optimizing conversion rates within individual media channels. While this approach drove revenue, it missed key audiences and led to wasted media spend.
With intelligentVIEW, Papa John’s gained access to deeper audience insights and omnichannel targeting, enabling them to align their offers with the right people at the right time. The result? Increased efficiency, reduced waste, and campaigns that delivered stronger ROI.
In today’s landscape, success lies in putting the audience at the center of your strategy. intelligentVIEW helps you do just that, turning data into action and ensuring every marketing dollar works harder.
“Once we started using intelligentVIEW, we gained many insights and a clear understanding of who Papa John’s consumers actually are, compared to who we thought they were.”
Chris Hannah
Marketing Manager at Papa John’s
Read more about how Papa John’s achieved a 6% increase in comparable store sales.
Over the past decade, with the rise of DSPs, SSPs, DCPs, and DMPs (side note: we’re playing a jargon game at our next CiG team event, and I plan to win), we’ve seen significant advances in tools that connect increasingly fragmented media channels. With the addition of CTV, retail networks, and gaming audiences, the potential to expand media reach has never been greater—but at what cost?
In today’s “do more with less” era, it’s crucial to be selective. However, I’d argue the starting point isn’t the media channel—after all, we’ve been running multi-channel campaigns for years. It starts with the audience. An audience-first approach is the key to delivering effective omnichannel programs while minimizing media waste.
From my conversations with marketing leaders, even more than AI, the top concern is privacy and mitigating risk. No one wants their brand trending for the wrong reasons. Here’s where the Canadian market offers a unique advantage: a fully anonymized, privacy-compliant common identifier—the six-digit postal code, modeled down to household distributions.
It only takes a moment for the light bulb to go off: this is a future-proofed, compliant solution that refines targeting and uncovers new audience opportunities.
In an era of tighter budgets—what Gartner refers to as “anemic” marketing budgets—the real opportunity lies in focusing on the audience first. By doing so, marketers can streamline efforts and identify the most effective media channels for reaching their target audience.
Sure, today’s optimization and retargeting tools can refine down to the highest-converting audience and find lookalikes. But what if, instead of wasting budget on broad or inaccurate initial targeting, marketers started with a granular understanding of their audience? What if they leveraged the assumption that every customer or prospect lives somewhere identifiable by a six-digit postal code, allowing them to efficiently align digital (Google DV, The Trade Desk, Meta, TikTok), offline (OOH, direct mail, in-store), and traditional (TV, radio, print) channels to target the same audience?
You could achieve more with the same—or even less—while delivering a better brand experience. All this, while staying on the right side of privacy and compliance.
At CiG, we understand the power of precise targeting. That’s why our intelligentVIEW platform is built to provide unparalleled insights into the Canadian market, helping marketers uncover new opportunities and execute data-driven omnichannel campaigns.
With access to over 30,000 consumer attributes from trusted sources like Numeris, Statistics Canada, and the national census, intelligentVIEW helps you create detailed audience segments based on demographics, spending habits, digital behaviors, and media consumption.
Supported by a digital database of over 40 million IDs covering 93% of Canadian households, our platform ensures your campaigns reach the right audience across the most effective channels—be it digital, direct mail, or broadcast. This level of precision drives engagement, maximizes ROI, and turns data into a powerful tool for your marketing success.